Yesterday Lluis
announced the last missing piece from our strategy to make
MonoDevelop a full cross-platform IDE: MonoDevelop now runs on
Windows as well:

When we started the planning for MonoDevelop 2.2, the major
goal of that release was to get feature parity on
Linux, MacOS
and Windows.

We want to grow the community of developers that contribute
to MonoDevelop and we wanted to attract add-in developers that
wanted to bring their IDE extensions to all three platforms.

MonoDevelop has recently been getting some nice community
contributed plugins like Flash/Flex development support, Vala
language support, Mono debugger for OSX (thanks to the nice
folks at Unity for this!), VI
editing mode and of course our own
Silverlight
and ASP.NET MVC add-ins.

My theory is that supporting MonoDevelop on all the three
major operating systems will have a multiplication effect in
terms of contributions to MonoDevelop: it will help both users
and will enable developers that extend MonoDevelop with
add-ins to reach more users.

I secretly want Unity to
adopt MonoDevelop as the code editor for Unity; for the
FlashDevelop guys on Windows to adopt MonoDevelop as their
cross-platform foundation (their users want a cross platform Flashdevelop);
for Flashbang to
bring their UnityScript framework to MonoDevelop

Developing an add-in for MonoDevelop now brings your
enhancements to a much larger community.

Look and Feel

Although the IDE is built using Gtk#, but we are aware
that developers want to get things integrated with their
operating system as much as possible. This is why we have
invested in properly integrating MonoDevelop with the Mac and
Windows.

The Look of MonoDevelop still has a heavy feel of the Linux
Gtk+, but we are bluring the lines by making the theme and
style match the operating system. Development in Gtk native
themes will also continue to improve things.

Feel wise, we make MonoDevelop follow the conventions of
the host platform. For example, on
the Mac,
MonoDevelop uses the Mac system menu, it uses an entirely
different keybinding style that follows what every Mac
developer expects (Command-KEY operations that match X-Code
for example) and even text selection in the editor behaves
differently:

More work will come, because we want MonoDevelop to feel
native on each platform.

On Windows for example, MonoDevelop runs on top of the .NET
Framework and uses the .NET managed debugger instead of using
Mono's runtime and Mono's debugger, so there is no dependency
on Mono to be installed on the system.